Friday, May 30, 2014

The C&C Kickstarter continues to grow, hitting stretch reward after stretch reward. This morning the second installment in the Aufstrag Megadungeon was reached, The Horned God's Acre is now in the mix. We are fast approaching the next goal of 50K which unlocks the dice cup.

Happy dice happy roll! Roll your dice with an official Castles and Crusades dice cup. Get in while you can, ONLY 3 days left!!!

All about the portico the battle raged, upon the mountain's slopes and in the skies above. Dragon fire ripped the evening skies. The clouds opened and rain fell, and lightning cut the skies, called by creatures great and small. Wicked blades of all shapes and sizes, spears and swords, all born into battle, wreaking havoc on flesh and bone. There was no order to the tumult, only madness and death.

And in the midst of it all stood Thorax, girded in armor of plate, fashioned of dragon bone, with the Sword of Embers in hand, wrapped in the Cloak of Red. Few could withstand his visage and all who tried, failed, dying upon his hellish blade. He laughed as he slew them, in all his beauty, he laughed and the sound of it carried far over the noise of the battlefield.

Thus Frafnog found him. Landing upon the rocky ground before the porch, that dragon, first born, stood before Thorax like a mountain. Thorax laughed at the dragon and pulled his head free of his helm and his hair fell, long and black upon slender shoulders. His eyes shone.

"At last beast. We meet. Too long have you lay hid and only rumor of you could I find."

The dragon rumbled deep in his chest and his eyes narrowed. In truth Frafnog had come into his prime, filled with the wisdom of age and the power of youth. He coiled around himself, his tail wrapping around a column and his long neck pulled back, much like an adder. "Aye." The dragon's voice was as a great slide of gravel over a rocky slope. "We meet at last. What measure must one take of the Red God to know his quality?"

"No measure made, dragon, charts the Red God.

But in him Frafnog could see strains of weakness, for Thorax had given much of himself in his minions, the Homeless House, diverting the Arc of Time and binding the Cloak of Red to him and the goblins not least of all. As the dwarves were want to say, "nothing comes of nothing" and Thorax the Red God had given so very much to the worlds of his creation.

"I see a measure, and you are less than you were so long ago. The world is lost to you."

A shadow of doubt passed the Red God and he frowned, the furrows on his brow marring his forehead. "Let us dance dragon and I'll show you the ire of the All Father!"

He leapt high, riding the terror of the Cloak of Red and the dragon balked, snapping his head to the side so that the blade cut its throat. Deep and burning the open wound bled and

This has to be the silliest, and most dangerous, patent given in awhile. Apparently Amazon applied for and got the patent for taking pictures against a white background. Here's their totally original, crazy, new age concept that they submitted to the USPTO.

Here's a good post about the ridiculousness of the patent over at Techdirt!

Dungeons and Dragons 5e lead developer put out recently that the fifth incarnation will not have third party support in the near future, but they plan to open it up by the Fall, with the program going live in 2015.

Mike Mearls posted this on the WOTC daily D&D: "To start with, we want to ensure that the quality of anything D&D fans create is as high as possible. The Dungeon Master's Guide will contain the guidelines for creating many elements of the game, from adventures to monsters. While Basic D&D will cover the basics that DMs need to create and run campaigns, it won't go into details on the thinking behind the rules and the consequences of tinkering with them. Basic D&D is aimed at new players or people who aren't looking for a lot of mechanical complexity or depth. It's enough to create adventures for use at your table, but not for material that you want to share broadly. For that reason, we don't want to launch anything at least until the Dungeon Master's Guide has been released in November."

A globe is a three-dimensional scale model of Earth (terrestrial globe or geographical globe) or other celestial body such as a planet or moon. While models can be made of objects with arbitrary or irregular shapes, the term globe is used only for models of objects that are approximately spherical. The word "globe" comes from the Latin word globus, meaning round mass or sphere. Some terrestrial globes include relief to show mountains and other features on the Earth's surface.

There are also globes, called celestial globes or astronomical globes, which are spherical representations of the celestial sphere, showing the apparent positions of the stars and constellations in the sky.

The sphericity of the Earth was established by Greek astronomy in the 3rd century BC, and the earliest terrestrial globe appeared from that period. The earliest known example is the one constructed by Crates of Mallus in Cilicia (now Çukurova in modern-day Turkey), in the mid-2nd century BC.

No terrestrial globes from Antiquity or the Middle Ages have survived. An example of a surviving celestial globe is part of a Hellenistic sculpture, called the Farnese Atlas, surviving in a 2nd-century AD Roman copy in the Naples Museum, Italy.

Traditionally, globes were manufactured by gluing a printed paper map onto a sphere, often made from wood.

The most common type has long, thin gores (strips) of paper that narrow to a point at the poles,[small disks cover over the inevitable irregularities at these points.
The more gores there are, the less stretching and crumpling is required
to make the paper map fit the sphere. From a geometric point of view,
all points on a sphere are equivalent – one could select any arbitrary
point on the Earth, and create a paper map that covers the Earth with
strips that come together at that point and the antipodal point.

Modern globes are often made from thermoplastic. Flat, plastic disks are printed with a distorted map of one of the Earth's Hemispheres.
This is placed in a machine which molds the disk into a hemispherical
shape. The hemisphere is united with its opposite counterpart to form a
complete globe.

A globe is usually mounted at a 23.5° angle on a meridian. In
addition to making it easy to use this mounting also represents the
angle of the planet in relation to its sun and the spin of the planet.
This makes it easy to visualize how days and seasons change.

Early terrestrial globes depicting the entirety of the Old World were constructed in the Islamic world.According to David Woodward, one such example was the terrestrial globe introduced to Beijing by the Persian astronomer, Jamal ad-Din, in 1267. The oldest surviving terrestrial globe is the Erdapfel, created by Martin Behaim in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1492.

International Sun Earth Explorer 3 to be exact, ISEE-3 for short was launched in 1978 through a join venture of NASA and ESRO. It spent the first several years of its journey orbiting the sun studying the plasma fields and the solar wind. In 1982 it passed into the tail of a comet and harvested invaluable information there. It did it again in 86. Why? because it could and it was kicking ass and taking names.

It continued to gather info until it was shut down by NASA in 1997. Its floated alone in the dark ever sense, watch the earth from afar.

Lonely no more! A group of enthusiasts recently sought permission from NASA to turn it back on and start communicating with it. And they did just that, after a long bought of trying to figure out how to communicate with the 1970s technology they woke ISEE-3 up.

They've sent a number of basic commands to the satellite, but little more. They are working all that out now.

The Kevin Russel film Stargate is slated for a reboot on steroids. Its now coming back…without Kevin Russel I suspect…as a trilogy. The original writer/director team is on board to bring this one about. Its MGM so they'll no doubt go all out on the affects and bring a solid level of realism to the screen. The original visionaries on board to guide it. Should be fun.

Toxophilite became established in the language as the name for a late
18th-century English archery society. The word derives from Greek
"toxon," which referred to both a bow and arrow, and "philos," meaning
"loving." Today, "toxophilite" is a rarely used word but often occurs in
vocabulary games and puzzles and in spelling bees. A more ubiquitous
descendant of "toxon" is "toxic." "Toxic" is an anglicization of Latin's
word for "poison," "toxicum," which originally meant "poison for
arrows" and is a borrowing from Greek "toxikon," meaning "arrow."

The Netflix adaptation of Daredevil now has a lead: Charlie Cox. He played a stint as a gangster on Boardwalk Empire (pretty good show, check it out) and did a good job there, so he definitely has the presence. And as one blogger pointed out, he's not a house hold name, so does not come with any preconceived notions.

Daredevil is really a cool superhero, because he's not over the top. More like Batman used to be, before he went all Emo on us (though he might be goth, I can't remember the designations). And he's never been brought to life before really well (the movie was Okay). And honestly, like Green Arrow, the small screen is probably where he belongs.

As is well known, in the Days Before Days, the first of the trees moved through the earth in slow migrations. Some, however, broke free of their roots and walked on thick legs and broad feet, modeled after the All Father's own. These trees lusted for all things and wandered the world wreaking havoc where they could and wresting things from all the peoples, great and small.These were the trolls.Eventually the weight of evil settles upon their backs and shoulders and slows them to a crawl. In time it is too great a burden to bear and they stop where they stand and root to the earth, a mimicry of their ancient selves.~The Codex of Aihrde

Scientists claim they will be able to turn light into matter within a year, by slamming two photons together, forcing them to fuse into an electron and positron. Thus subatomic matter is made. They have put this together in "principle" and are now shopping around for a place to try it out in practice. That will be Rochester, New York or Berkshire in England.

I always wonder about these announcements…in a year we'll be able to do thus. Well, who not Tuesday? Do it Tuesday. You can probably get a hamburger out of it. (that was a reference to Popeye's friend, "I'll gladly pay you tuesday for a hamburger today."

A curtain wall is the defensive wall surrounding the bailey of a medieval castle. It can also be a defensive wall between two bastions of a castle or fortress in post-medieval fortifications.

In earlier designs of castles the curtain walls were often built to a considerable height and were fronted by a ditch or moat to make assault difficult.

Later, with the introduction of trace italienne fortifications, the height of the curtain walls was reduced, and beyond the ditch, additional outworks such as ravelins and tenailles were added to protect the curtain walls from direct cannonading.

Dynamite has posted a Free Preview of its new comic Doctor Spektor over on ICV2. Spektor is a billionaire wall street mogul who travels the world hunting vampires, werewolves and tackling the occult. Check it out.

The Winter Princess knocked down Iron Man and stomped on his head! Frozen surpassed Iron Man 3 as the fifth largest grossing film of all time. It has brought in a ground shaking 1.219 billion dollars world wide. Its held the number 1 spot in Japan forever and a day.

This has been on my hit list to watch but I haven't gotten to it yet. I may have off today and have a gander at it.

In other news Xmen ripped open the box office at 111 million (tipping Godzilla's top notch at 102 million). But the King of Monsters continues to rake in the doe, especially world wide.

And this weekend we have Maleficent to look forward to, which, if the visuals are any indicator, is going to be magnificent.

The C&C Kickstarter blasted through another stretch goal late last night, unlocking Dzeebagd the second part of the Death in the Treklant adventure series (its pronounced Shee-bog by the way, with a bit of a “z” sound on the opening).

Trollzah!

We are fast approaching our 35k by Friday and unlocking Arms and Armor and the Epic Level Play. This latter books lands all the epic level stats for pledge levels $25 and up.